My theory is that Gore wanted to make a hard ‘R’ film… Then Watchmen came out, and it didn’t do well for whatever reason. The studio then got cold feet about making an R rated $200 million film, and they said what if it was a $80 million film—and Gore didn’t want to make a $80 million film.

A new director was brought in, Levine didn’t like the direction the project was taking, and thus it was killed.

In a way it’s probably for the best. BioShock‘s central conceit is driven by deconstructing how players are driven towards doing certain things with the illusion of it being the player’s choice to do so. Without that idea in place, the game’s story kind of falls apart, even if ripping on Ayn Rand is an evergreen intellectual pastime. The story is at risk of basically turning into Libertarian Hunter: This Time It’s Sociopolitical without that theme.

Of course, considering a bunch of libertarians want to actually build Rapture, that might be a reality show in the near future. We came up with it first, Hollywood, you have to give us first refusal rights.

Interesting… I knew some folks working on “Rapture” and production stopped sometime in February of that year. Watchmen came out in March. If memory serves, the reason they were given was that the studio became skeptical of the price tag having come out of January 2009 when the economy hit rock bottom, and the prevailing Hollywood “wisdom” was that in a bad economy nobody would be interested in dark Sci-Fi, or any Sci-Fi for that matter. Transformers, Star Trek, District 9, and Avatar all went on to do very well that year, while Universal went on to release a series of flops… IRONY!

If the smart logic were that video game properties could make money for the film industry, which is the main reason behind most of the rights being purchased, then where is the Call of Duty movie or why haven’t they attached the name to something already? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’d perpetuate the negative CoD Bro stereotype and more films would attempt to ride the bandwagon, but I’m just genuinely curious.